I would like to share a showcase of work for a game project I am working on called TRIWAY. I have been working on the art and animation for the last couple of months or so. I am proud of this little video. It has made me excited about showing off the other stuff I have done in the future, and of course the game itself.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzwhJLGR97U&feature=youtu.beBefore starting this project I had limited experience with pixel art. Nevertheless, our head programmer/game designer wanted a pixel style for the game. It was initially a challenge to translate my skills as a digital painter to this very minimalistic style. I was surprised how quickly it became a natural way to work. In some ways, pixel art can be extremely forgiving. At least that was my experience with it. Being so simple also makes it considerably easier to adjust if things don't look right.
I also had limited experience in animation. I had made a small number of animations in the past and I have learnt a lot of theory but it is still something I have been largely unfamiliar with. The pixel art presents a lot of challenges with movement. Movement of one pixel is a lot of movement so I have to consider it very carefully. Getting from point A to B to C and back to A again has been interesting and I am really glad I already know some tricks to help with it. The spell-casters were the easiest to conceptualise for. They have nice gestures that utilise their different magic techniques, and the variety comes with the spell effects themselves (which I left out as I wanted to save those for gameplay footage). The spell effects are somewhat abstract and a great deal of fun to do.
I have been learning a lot and utilising knowledge I already had, but the surprise has been the subtleties of animation. I was least confident in that area and wasn't intending to try hard with it, but they ended up happening naturally just because they made sense. The first character has a number of subtleties. My favourite being his headdress bouncing a little at the end of the sword attack.
The video itself is all animation, too. I didn't use video editing software to compile it. All the fades were done with layer opacity settings. After showing it to the game designer, she suggested a little title sequence, and I ended up adding a few other extras: the fades, the closing 'credit' and the obligatory social media stuff. I had only ever done time lapses of digital paintings before this, so I'm very pleased with the end results.
